confabulation

they say let sleeping dogs lie,
and Raela does —
professionally, extravagantly,
right there on her “Eeyore” pillow,
all twenty pounds of her
committing fraud.

in the dream she is enormous.
the mailman has finally been dealt with.
the cats show reverence.
she patrols a fence line
that in this world she cannot see over,
and the coyotes of Clay County
speak her name in lowered voices.

in the dream she is not a dog at all
but the smallest of our children,
which is a lie she also tells awake,
climbing into laps like she pays rent,
seventy in dog years
and still nursing the fiction
that she is somebody’s baby.

technically, she’s not wrong.
that’s how the best lies work.
her paws are running now.
whatever she’s chasing,
she catches it.
She always catches it in the dream.

I could wake her.
one word — her name, or “treat”
and the wolf collapses back
into a little over a foot of overthrown empire,
blinking at me like I’m the one
who’s been lying.

instead I stay very still on my end
of the couch, where I am
still only thirty-five,
still going to write a book,
still the kind of man
a dog like that would believe in,

and I let her sleep.
one of us
has to keep watch.